Sesame Street Game Turns Kinect Into Sensitivity Trainer

Cookie Monster and Elmo explore the forest with Marco, a new character designed for Kinect game Once Upon A Monster.Image courtesy Warner Bros.

The upcoming Kinect game based on Sesame Street isn’t your typical kiddie fare.

Unlike many games for toddlers, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster doesn’t drill numbers and letters into young players’ heads using fuzzy animals. Instead, it’s all about “emotional entertainment,” according to project lead Nathan Martz, who works for San Francisco studio Double Fine Productions.

The game uses Kinect’s hands-free controls to teach lessons about “real human themes like shyness, friendship, bravery, sensitivity, empathy,” said Martz, adding that though videogames often capture human emotions, they rarely teach sensitivity. How often are gamers really asked to think about the impact of their actions on other peoples’ lives?

As an example, Martz pointed to Once Upon a Monster‘s opening scene, in which players meet a monster named Marco who looks absolutely miserable. It’s his birthday, and nobody’s shown up to celebrate with him. Using Kinect’s camera-based motion controller, players interact with onscreen visual cues and strike poses in response to Marco’s body language in an effort to cheer him up.

“As the game progresses, you do sillier and sillier poses together, until at the end you’ve made a new friend,” Martz said.

Launched late last year, Microsoft’s innovative Kinect allows players to control games intuitively simply by moving their bodies or speaking voice commands. It has proven quite popular with young children developing motor skills, but besides Kinectimals, there’s been a strange lack of games geared toward one of the device’s most receptive audiences.

Once Upon a Monster, which Warner Bros. will release later this year, will seek to fill that gap. It’s a bit of a turn for Double Fine, a studio whose last big project was Brutal Legend, a heavy-metal strategy game starring Ozzy Osbourne.

Studio head Tim Schafer called working with Muppets a refreshing change of pace. “[We’d] worked on enough games where a big muscular guy says ‘Delta’ a lot,” Schafer said. “We wanted to make a game about joy.”

Once Upon A Monster originated during Amnesia Fortnight, a two-week exercise in which Double Fine broke up into four groups to devise ideas for low-budget games. Among these were some of the company’s other recent game releases: Costume Quest and Stacking and the upcoming Trenched.

A final idea originally revolved around a world filled with minigames and monsters that somewhat resembled the Muppets.

“Every time we pitched the idea, someone would say, ‘Have you ever thought about putting Sesame Street on this?'” said Schafer.

Soon enough, the deal was in place, and Elmo and Cookie Monster were sharing the spotlight with original characters created by Double Fine.

“I do have a special place in my heart for Cookie Monster,” Schafer said.

Controller-Free Cooperation

Sesame Street executive producer of gaming Miles Ludwig says Once Upon a Monster creates opportunities for families to play together. In an early sequence, Elmo hops up on Marco’s shoulders to run through a forest filled with obstacles. The more adept player can take the part of Marco, dodging left and right to avoid things, while the Elmo player interacts with the treetops.

Even though many Kinect owners are early adopters desperately looking for new titles that tap the system’s capabilities, Ludwig says he doesn’t expect adults to want to play Once Upon a Monster alone.

“The challenges are simplified in order to be playable by younger kids,” said Ludwig, who says children take to Microsoft’s controller-free Kinect like ducks to water. “But as a family game or even a party game, the humor, immersion and tone have broad appeal.”

Making family games can prove rewarding in unexpected ways, too.

“I was leaving for work one morning, and my daughter asked, ‘Are you making a game for me, Daddy?'” said Double Fine’s Schafer. “So I said, ‘No, I … wait, yes I am! I’m making a game with Elmo in it!'”